Lynn Thorndike (July 24, 1882 – December 28, 1965) was an American historian ofmedieval science andalchemy.[1][2] He was the son of a clergyman, Edward R. Thorndike, and the younger brother ofAshley Horace Thorndike, an American educator and expert on William Shakespeare, andEdward Lee Thorndike, known for being the father of modern educational psychology.[3]
InA Short History of Civilization (1926), Thorndike was the first historian to propose the term "early modern" to describe what is today recognized as theearly modern period, about 1500–1800.[4]
Thorndike was born inLynn, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1882. He attendedWesleyan University inMiddletown, Connecticut, where he graduated with aBachelor of Arts in 1902, and then medieval history aMaster of Arts in medieval history fromColumbia University in 1903 and doctorate in 1903. Thorndike's doctoral dissertation (1905) was about "The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe", which he went on to link with the historical development of experimental science.[1]
He began teaching medieval history atNorthwestern University in 1907. He moved toWestern Reserve University in 1909 and stayed there until 1924. Columbia University lured him away in fall 1924 and he taught there until he retired from teaching in 1950.
Counter to Swiss historianJacob Burckhardt who argued that theItalian Renaissance was a separate phase, Thorndike believed that most of the political, social, moral and religious phenomena which are commonly defined as Renaissance seemed to be almost equally characteristic of Italy at any time from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries.[6][clarification needed]
Among his books onmagic and science are:A History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vol., 1923–1958),[7] spanning the period from early Christianity through early modern Europe to the end of the 17th century.[8] In that book, he commented about the best way to find historical truth:[9]
Some investigators of manuscripts, like certain anthropologists and archeologists, seem to think that they attain a higher degree of scholarship, if they propound some novel and improbable theory and adduce a certain amount of evidence for it. This is hardly the direct or rapid method of attaining historical truth.
Another book by Thorndike about magic and science isScience and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929). Thorndike also wroteThe History of Medieval Europe (1917, 3d ed. 1949) and translated the medieval astronomical textbookDe sphaera mundi ofJohannes de Sacrobosco.
The Sixteenth Century, Columbia University Press, 1959.
Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century; Studies in the History of Medicine and Surgery, Natural and Mathematical Science, Philosophy, and Politics, 1963
"Whatever Was, Was Right", Presidential Address Read at the Annual Dinner of the American Historical Association, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D. C., December 29, 1955
^Part of Volume I, originally printed asA History of Magic and Experimental Science during the first thirteen centuries of our era: volume I (of two volumes) (1923), is also online in 'previewable' part, containing"Book III. The early middle ages", pages 549–835 with indexes from the original Volume I. (This part is now described, in online metadata, as "volume 2 of 14".)
^Lynn Thorndike (1934).A History of Magic and Experimental Science: Fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, pp. 253–254. Columbia University Press.
